Tom Cohen

Tom Cohen is a graduate student at the MIT Media Lab, supervised by Alex “Sandy” Pentland. His research combines AI, network science, and computational social science, exploring how large-scale systems of humans and AI agents coordinate, communicate, and make decisions in pursuit of a shared objective. In particular, he studies how individual and group factors shape the behavior and collective outcomes of human versus agent societies, with the broader goal of building systems of collective intelligence that combine the strengths of humans and AI. His work has appeared in Nature Communications, including research on recovering coordinating communities from temporal metadata and its implications for privacy.

Alongside his research, Tom has worked as a software and machine learning engineer at two startups, in healthcare and intellectual property, where he trained language models and built production inference systems around them. He holds a Bachelor’s degree from Columbia University with a double major in Data Science and Psychology.